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PHILADELPHIA,  September 9, 2019—Philadelphia Stories celebrates its 15th anniversary with a gala event at the Cheltenham Center for the Arts (439 Ashbourne Road, Cheltenham, PA) on Saturday, November 16, 2019, from 7-10pm. The festivities will include a cocktail reception, live auction, art opening, and the release of The Best of Philadelphia Stories, 15th Anniversary Edition anthology.

Philadelphia Stories, co-founded by Carla Spataro and Christine Weiser in 2004, began with the mission to publish the finest literary fiction, poetry, essays, and art from the Delaware Valley, and to make the quarterly magazine available for free. Since its inception, the non-profit organization has expanded its programs to include two national contests, a magazine for young writers, and a books division.

“We are grateful to the amazing writers and artists who have shared their work in our magazine over the past 15 years,” says Philadelphia Stories Executive Director Christine Weiser. “It is an honor to showcase the talent of the Delaware Valley in Philadelphia Stories and share their work with 5,000 readers each quarter. It is also an honor to have the support of our member community who help keep the magazine in print and free.”

“When I came across the issue of Philadelphia Stories that contained my piece in my local Delaware County library,” writes author Nancy Farrell, “the joy I experienced was immeasurable. Philadelphia Stories sparks the imagination of the public, likely inspiring its readers to pick up a pen or a paint brush. Philadelphia Stories is a special publication, and what exists within its pages is magical.”

The 15th Anniversary Party will celebrate fifteen years of writing with the launch of The Best of Philadelphia Stories, 15th Anniversary Edition.

The 15th Anniversary Celebration will also be the opening of the art exhibit, The Philadelphia Stories 15th Anniversary Art Exhibition, a unique collaboration of local artists celebrating 15 years of publishing the work of local artists. The public opening of the exhibit will take place on Saturday, November 16, 2019, and runs through December 5, 2019 at the Cheltenham Center for the Arts.

“Previously published as an artist in Philadelphia Stories myself, it has been my honor to serve the magazine as Art Editor and to now curate the exhibit commemorating its 15th anniversary,” says Pam McLean-Parker. “In celebration of this anniversary, Philadelphia Stories will feature a selection of the original artwork published over the last five years in a three-week exhibit at Cheltenham Center for the Arts this fall. Our Invitational Exhibition will include much of the artwork published in Philadelphia Stories between Winter 2015 and Fall 2019, during which time, Philadelphia Stories has published 156 visual works by nearly one hundred artists from throughout the Delaware Valley! The Philadelphia Stories 15th Anniversary Art Exhibition promises to be the most significant invitational group art exhibit in the Philadelphia Area this fall!”

The 15th Anniversary Party will include an online and live auction that will benefit Philadelphia Stories’ mission to “cultivate a community of writers, artists, and readers.” Tickets for the celebration are $40 per person in advance and $45 at the door. Click here to reserve your ticket.

For more details, please visit www.PhiladelphiaStories.org.

About Philadelphia Stories

Philadelphia Stories is a 501c3 that has served the writing, reading, and art community of the Greater Delaware Valley since 2004. Co-founders Carla Spataro and Christine Weiser began Philadelphia Stories to promote the culture of the Philadelphia area. Since that time, Philadelphia Stories has supported its mission to build a Philadelphia-based community of writers, artists, and readers through the free magazine and affordable educational programs and events, including sponsoring national poetry and fiction awards and publishing Philadelphia Stories Junior and PS Teen, magazines devoted to publishing the writing and art of children from the Delaware Valley, ages 18 and younger.

About the Cheltenham Center for the Arts
In 1940, Gladys Wagner, Tobeleah Wechsler, and Helen Foster founded the Cheltenham Center for the Arts with the goal of building a supportive community “for people to work together and talk together about art.” The Cheltenham Center for the Arts is dedicated to making the arts an integral part of people’s lives, as well as supporting the artists who live and work in the vicinity. The Center offers inspiring instruction and programming that both meets the interests, and broadens the horizons of our community.

A little known fact, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina was inspired by a writing prompt suggested during his Thursday evening writing group at the Moscow library. The prompt: “write a story that ends with a suicide via railway. Make vocab twelfth grade reading level and use numerous flashbacks, a minimum of one blizzard, and two characters with names ending in ‘nina.'”

I confess a certain snobby, literary disdain for the idea of writing prompts, as if a real writer wouldn’t need manufactured inspiration from the exercise section of a how-to writing book.  A real writer wouldn’t enter the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction contest for worst first sentence similar to “it was a dark and stormy night.” And yet, the truth is that I’ve had personal success using writing prompts. One of my grad classes at Penn required us to write a story in the form of an advice column. My story (and others) found publication in volume based on this idea (Prompted). Without that very specific nudge, I never would have written the piece, or probably even conceived of the format.

I’ve also found that when I teach writing, students often respond with creative work that dazzles based on some basic constraints (examples: giving students a startling first line of dialogue, asking them to base a story on a single painting, writing exercises that start with “I remember the first time I…”). Most students seem to thrive on some level of prompting, rather than facing an entirely blank page and carte blanche to write whatever they want.

My hesitation to suggest that you use writing prompts to get started comes from some bad writing prompts I’ve seen. This one, for example: “Suddenly, she discovered…” To me, that prompt sets the writer up for a fatal first sentence that places the climax at the beginning of the story, rather than near the end. It also sets the writer up for some bad first ideas. “Suddenly, she discovered she was a dog. Suddenly, she discovered, she was on Mars. Suddenly, she discovered she didn’t want to marry Bob.” And yet…One of my favorite short stories by Amy Bloom, “Love is Not a Pie” begins very similarly: “In the middle of the eulogy at my mother’s boring and heartbreaking funeral, I began to think about calling off the wedding. August 21 did not seem like a good date, John Wescott did not seem like a good person to marry, and I couldn’t see myself in the long white silk gown Mrs. Wescott had offered me.”

In addition, there are a number of writing contests that use writing prompts/constraints as formats for submissions. NPR used to do an excellent fiction contest called “Three Minute Fiction” that would give writers a first line to start with, and the constraint that you had to tell a complete story in under 600 words (something that can be read in under three minutes). I never won any of those contests, but I tried them every time. There’s a recent contest by Owl Canyon Press that dictates the first and last paragraph of a story, asking the writer to fill in the 48 paragraphs in between to create the story. I started that challenge on a day when my brain wasn’t giving me much else, and the trickiness of trying to weave in the first details with the last details in mind felt exhilarating, like figuring out a difficult crossword puzzle. In the meantime, a story started to take shape and I was able to get my word count done for the day. They are out there, those rogue writing prompts, and they are often associated with other constraints, including a deadline to finish.

There is a part of me that still resists this idea of prompts because it feels like I’m cheating somehow by not coming up with my own fuel. But the truth is, it’s sometimes hard to jump-start the creative mind, and so anything that moves you forward—first lines, last lines, deadlines—has value. The goal each day is to put words on the page, and so I suggest that if you, like Tolstoy, find you’re getting the work done by starting with “Suddenly, she found herself on the train tracks…” then by all means, jump in.

My stepson is reading Romeo and Juliet for his eighth grade English class. I asked him what he thought about it the other day during dinner.

He shrugged and tucked a forkful of mashed potatoes into his mouth.

“I don’t want to ruin it for you,” I warned. “But it doesn’t end well.”

“I know,” he responded.

I told him that when I was in eighth grade, I memorized the entire balcony scene from the play. I didn’t tell him that I had done it because I prayed that someday soon, Jim Hurst of the swim team and I may have a similar exchange. Never mind that I lived in single level house in Florida, and the only impediment to our romance was my Coke-bottle eye glasses and his total lack of interest. I pictured a balcony at the Don Caesar, myself in an eyelet dress with sassafras wound in my feathered hair. Him, standing below, possibly in just swim trunks, would call up to me in a deep voice with only a hint of crack, saying: “I take thee at thy word. Call me but love, and I’ll be new baptis’d; henceforth I never will be Romeo/Jim.” Somehow, it would work out sans the dual suicide and despite the chasmic-sized popularity differences.

It did not. Wherefore art thou, Jim? (Actually, Facebook tells me that he’s a pro golfer living in St. Pete with twin daughters and a wife named Bethany Anne.)

But these early ideas of romance and storytelling stayed with me as a writer throughout my teen years as I struggled to come up with love stories that illustrated that same longing and defiance that captivated me at age thirteen. I’d write heroes with barrel-chests and tousled golden curls, heroines with eyes that were always a weird color—grey like slate, churning sea green (?), lavender. They were loosely based on a mixture of Shakespeare, the movie Blue Lagoon, and romance novels I stole from my aunt JoAnne. Inevitably, the women wore bodices and the men had ripped blouse-like shirts. I cared mostly about the exteriors, the long descriptions of the way waist-length hair rippled in the summer breeze or the man’s white teeth gnashed with desire, much like a stallion’s, the “maiden blush” bepainting a cheek.

I’d come up with these scenes and show them to my mom, an avid reader, who would concentrate on the lined notebook pages and hand them back with vaguely encouraging words to keep at it.

I knew what I was writing was phony, stolen. Until I was a junior in high school, I hadn’t been kissed. I hadn’t even been in danger of being kissed. There had never even been hand-holding. The closest I had come was a note from Steve Crossett, one year older and a red-head, who’d written that he thought I was “a pretty decent person.” Pin that one up on your bulletin board next to a photo of Christopher Reeves as Superman ripped out of Seventeen.

I asked my mom for advice. How did she think I should write love scenes? She paused, considering. I could see that she was weighing her options. “Write it like it really is,” she said finally. What did she mean? She thought for a minute. She knew that I spent an inordinate amount of time in the library, and very little time with the opposite sex. Unless you counted Wednesday night bell choir practice. “I mean, write about leaning into kiss someone and you miss. Or your elbow going numb on the table while you’re waiting for your date to finish his boring story. Write about what it’s really like, not what you think it should be like.”

This is possibly the best writing advice I’ve ever received, along the lines of well-worn maxim to write what you know. I had thought that writing was all about imagining yourself into the world you wanted to inhabit.  It is that. But it’s also about being able to see that situation as it truly is for your character—to picture all of its complexities and discomforts— the alive parts and the numb parts, the perfect moment and the awkward one. My love stories have mostly been awkward ones. Awkward, funny, lovely, horrible, and true. That’s the writing world I inhabit, and though I still love the tumbling poetry of Shakespeare, I stick to what feels most true to my experience.